National Student Start-up Policy: Major step for encouraging student entrepreneurs

The National Student Start-up Policy aims to create 100,000 students owned tech-based start-ups and a million employment opportunities by 2025. Formulated by AICTE, the policy would outline roles of the AICTE, academic institutions, and TBI (Technology Business Incubators) in creating student entrepreneurs aims to identify the potential of students and transform them into start-up entrepreneurs. […]

The National Student Start-up Policy aims to create 100,000 students owned tech-based start-ups and a million employment opportunities by 2025. Formulated by AICTE, the policy would outline roles of the AICTE, academic institutions, and TBI (Technology Business Incubators) in creating student entrepreneurs aims to identify the potential of students and transform them into start-up entrepreneurs.

This policy is intended to guide AICTE approved institutions when implementing the government’s ‘Start-up India’ initiative. The curriculum in these institutes will have 30% knowledge related courses, 40% skills based courses and 30% attitude related courses.

To bolster the start-up eco-system in India, the government has also proposed to introduce start-up fests at national and international levels. It has made a provision in its National Start-up Policy to set up a fund with an initial corpus of Rs 2,500 crore and a total corpus of Rs 10,000 crore over a period of four years (i.e. Rs 2,500 crore per year).

The Fund will be about the nature of start-up for the funds, which means that it will not invest directly into the start-ups, but shall participate in the capital of Sebi registered venture funds. AICTE can facilitate its institutions to connect, network and use funds which apparently support campus start-ups.

An Infrastructure Fund with an initial annual outflow of Rs 20 crore shall be set up to support start-ups in academic institu-tes. It will fulfill requirements of hard and soft infrastructure such as physical infras-tructure for demand analysis data set, testing labs, design studio, IT labs, tool rooms, video-conferencing facilities, etc.